WorkFriedrich de la Motte Fouqué

Undine

Undine (Berlin, 1811) Inferred

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) · Berlin, 1811

AnalyzedReadMentioned

Documented 1839–1845

Letters • Books • Essays

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist1record

V. New York3records

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1839—

Letter to Caroline Sturgis

p43

analyzed · read

“No one can predict what will be the fate of these Undine's when they get their souls by wedlock.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Inferred Fuller alludes to Fouqué's Undine (1811) by referencing women who "get their souls by wedlock," echoing the novella's central conceit that the water sprite Undine gains a soul through marriage to the knight Huldbrand.

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

read

“_S_. You would make a pretty Undine, to be sure!”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred The dialogue character S. addresses J. as a potential 'Undine,' referring to the water sprite heroine of Fouqué's famous novella Undine (1811). The next line reinforces the elemental spirit framework. Fuller clearly draws on Fouqué's widely read tale. 'Undine' was a proper name uniquely associated with this work.

1844—

Letter to Sarah Shaw

p226

analyzed · read

“The association of Undine with these ugly books pictures the course of too many lives.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Inferred Fuller alludes to Fouqué's Undine, the Romantic fairy tale about an elemental water-spirit who marries a mortal knight. Hudspeth identified the reference and note that Fuller had engaged deeply with Undine as a type of feminine spiritual power, discussing it in Woman in the Nineteenth Century; here she comments on how women's spiritual vitality becomes associated with sentimental domestic literature.

Hudspeth identified the reference and note that Fuller had engaged deeply with Undine as a type of feminine spiritual power, discussing it in Woman in the Nineteenth Century; here she comments on how women's spiritual vitality becomes associated with sentimental domestic literature.

1845—

Library of Choice Reading.

“Library of Choice Reading.”

analyzed · read2 selected passages

“No tale ever found more universal acceptance than Undine.”

“But, in Undine, there is that subtle interweaving of the divine with the natural and human, that penetration of the clods of earth by the rays of a distant sun”

Fuller, Margaret. "Library of Choice Reading." New-York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1845.